Tracking

February 14, 2014

As we start to think about #AIIM14, Here are the three questions I'm asking all the sponsors...

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

So here goes short interview #3, with Sean Nathaniel, VP of Technology at Upland Software and General Manager of FileBound by Upland.

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

The legacy solutions are not solving the content chaos, they are contributing to it. When software is hard to use or not made accessible to everyone in the organization, users will work around it.

Content chaos can only be controlled by strong, flexible and agile workflow to process the content. Our customers not only want superior workflow functionality to ensure process consistency and efficiency, they also need to be able to react quickly to market changes or changes in how the business operates. And they need this robust capability to be elegantly simple.

The changing workforce requires proven Cloud solutions to manage the content chaos. It’s not about Millennials vs. The Rest of Us. We see clear trends such as geographically dispersed and mobile workforces, cross-departmental collaboration and an increased amount of work done by contractors. Our customers address these challenges by building cloud solutions that are easily accessed from anywhere and any device and require minimal training.

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

Transforming how work gets done will require Cloud-native solutions with proven security, scalability and availability. As cloud solutions continue to gain acceptance and increase market share, it will become clear which solutions are truly built to deliver enterprise functionality and performance in the Cloud. Legacy solutions that jumped on the Cloud bandwagon won’t survive this shift.

The way work gets done is changing, and mobile capabilities from native mobile applications and responsive web applications that work on any device, anywhere are critical. BYOD is here and users will not tolerate having to go through separate steps to accommodate all of the devices in the enterprise.

Managing the content is the past; the future is about freeing content through solutions that enable content process automation. Users aren’t focusing on “document processing;” they want to know how they are going to get their work done. The companies in our industry that will thrive two years from now are the ones that make it easy for users to see what needs to be done – and do it. At the same time, management will require easy-to-use analytical tools that don’t require a SQL DBA to see how the business is doing.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

FileBound is a Cloud-native process automation solution and has a large base of companies from the small to mid-size enterprise to companies in the Fortune 50 using FileBound Cloud.

FileBound is completely focused on workflow process automation that enables companies to eliminate the content chaos.

FileBound’s strength is delivering robust capability through simple elegance, which is why enterprises large and small are implementing FileBound, often replacing outdated or complicated legacy solutions. Whether it’s document management, workflow process automation, business analytics, intelligent forms or system integration, FileBound is the right solution for the enterprise and delivers immediate ROI.

February 13, 2014

As we start to think about #AIIM14, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions and put them on a bit of a hot seat with regards to how they see the future -- and let attendees start thinking about your own questions to ask them in Orlando. Here are the three questions I'm asking:

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

So here goes short interview #2, with John Newton from Alresco (and immediate past chair of AIIM):

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

How do we control information flowing out of the business into internet sites?

How do we modernize and replace our old proprietary vendor stack?

How do we securely on-board employees with their mobile devices, particularly BYOD?

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

The role that Cloud and on-line services will play in business processes that go beyond the enterprise.

An increasing portion of enterprise information and content will be consumed on mobile devices which will require new security models.

Regulatory and legal issues will hold back adoption of some important processes that need to be in the Cloud.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

I know it's four, but I had a hard time choosing:

Alfresco brings simplicity in use and smart processing to the complex business of managing business-critical processes and document management.

Alfresco is a modern ECM platform that is open source and open standards, which prevents lock in of data and vendor relationship.

Alfresco is the only true Hybrid Content Management platform that allows you to manage and integrate sensitive information on-premise with business-to-business collaboration in the Cloud.

Alfresco is in mission-critical applications due to openness and extensibility in thousands of government agencies, financial services organizations and high-tech manufacturing companies.

I believe there are three major disruptors that are simultaneously colliding to transform the world as we know it.

Consumerization -- transforming what users expect from applications.

Mobile and Cloud -- leading to an expectation of anywhere, anytime access.

Changing Nature of Work -- forcing organizations to think flat and agile, not hierarchical and slow.

Managing the #InfoChaos created by the volume, variety and velocity of information and content from these disrupters is THE business challenge of the next decade. Let’s take a moment to think about why each of these is so disruptive to how we manage information.

Consumerization -- transforming what users expect from applications

We are in an era of massive decentralization of technology resources and a massive increase in the talent available to utilize those resources. In Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation, Forrester’s James McQuivey looks at the four major factors necessary for massive disruption:

“A computer? Check.

An internet connection? Check.

A programming language and SDK? Check.

A friction-free platform for distributing and making money…? Check.”

What this means is that how we look at applications in the enterprise, how we buy enterprise technology, and how we deploy enterprise systems are all changing simultaneously. There are more sources of innovation available in more places in the world than ever before, and the era in which organizations could exclusively depend on their internal IT resources as a source of competitive advantage is at an end.

It wasn’t that long ago that complex enterprise systems were the exclusive domain of a limited number of vendors who delivered complex and expensive solutions to a relatively limited number of primarily large customers. That’s all changed. SaaS companies like Salesforce.com, Workday.com, Marketo.com, and Basecamp.com have totally revolutionized the market for enterprise scale solutions.

The assumption that many business people now have is that solutions can be delivered as seamlessly and as simply as consumer-based solutions are delivered in our private lives. This isn’t fair -- and it certainly isn’t this simple – but that is the assumption. As organizations increasingly confront information management challenges that begin with paper and end somewhere in the cloud, the potential for increasing Information Chaos intensifies.

Mobile and Cloud -- leading to an expectation of anywhere, anytime access

Cloud and mobile are the two great technology steroids. They change everything. They change our expectations of where we can work, when we can work, with whom we can work, and on what devices we can work.

According to Portio Research (March 2013), 1.2 billion people worldwide were using mobile apps at the end of 2012. This is forecast to grow at a 29.8 percent each year, to reach 4.4 billion users by the end of 2017. Much of this growth will come from Asia, which will account for almost half of app users in 2017.

There has also been a revolution in the platforms we use to host content and processes. According to ABI Research (March 2013), 56 billion smartphone apps will be downloaded in 2013. By operating system: 58 percent will be Google Android; 33 percent Apple iOS; 4 percent Microsoft Windows Phone; 3 percent BlackBerry.

This can’t help but influence how we ultimately think about Enterprise applications. Gartner (April 2013) predicts that by 2017, 25 percent of enterprises will have an enterprise app store. They also note, "Apps downloaded from public app stores for mobile devices disrupt IT security, application and procurement strategies. Bring your own application (BYOA) has become as important as bring your own device (BYOD) in the development of a comprehensive mobile strategy.”

A new generation of knowledge workers brings radically different perceptions of how individual employees connect with enterprise systems. Per the CISCO 2012 Connected World Technology Report, “For the “always-connected” generation, a single mobile device will do, whether it is a personal device or a company-owned device, which creates challenges for the IT managers who must safeguard company assets and information.” Two out of five workers under age 30 say their company’s policy forbids them to use company-issued devices for non-work activities; however nearly three out of four (71 percent) say they don’t always obey those policies. Organizational policy has not yet caught up operational reality. In 50% of organizations, employees are encouraged to use social tools in relation to their job, but in half of these – 26% -- no guidelines are given for how they should accomplish this. (AIIM, Social in the Flow).

Cloud technologies work in a constantly reinforcing loop with mobile technologies to disrupt the way we traditionally think about information management.

There is a tendency to think about the cloud purely in terms of cost savings. However, as Forbes’ Joe McKendrick points out, “IT cost savings and speedier deployment are but a brief prelude to the main story. It’s only the first 10 percent. The remaining 90 percent is what happens to the business itself. It’s the transformation, enabling it to react to market opportunities, communicate and collaborate internally and externally, design and test new products, and become more agile. This ‘second chapter’ to cloud will produce far greater, but far more intangible, benefits.”

According to Geoffrey Moore, “SaaS frees us all from the tyranny of the product release business model. Yes, with SaaS there is some level of ongoing disruption that you must cope with both within IT and with your user base, but please, do not even mention that in the same breath with the kind of burden the product release model imposes. Instead, thank your lucky stars you are getting innovation that you are paying for when you are paying for it. It is current, and so are you. This is huge!”

The challenge, of course, in all of this is that mobile and cloud technologies increase the volume, variety, and velocity of information in our organizations – and heighten Information Chaos in the short term.

Changing Nature of Work -- forcing organizations to think flat and agile, not hierarchical and slow

According to the BusinessDictionary.com, a flat organization is one “in which most middle-management levels and their functions have been eliminated, thus bringing the top management in direct contact with the frontline salespeople, shop floor employees, and customers.”

The flattening of hierarchies is accelerated by consumerization and cloud and mobile technologies. In Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World, Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta, two professors at INSEAD, talk about how corporations are evolving from a traditional pyramid set-up to a much flatter network one. “Network organizations are generally characterized by informal trust networks,” the authors write. Their employees are “intrinsically motivated based on personal satisfaction…The advantage of network organizations is their adaptiveness and capacity to innovate when faced with change and uncertainty. . . . Network organizations, needless to say, are the habitat of Web 2.0 social media.” (quoted from Forbes, 2/2/2011).

Per Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework: “We're not big fans of what I consider "vertical" ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.”

While social technologies by themselves will not disrupt rigid hierarchies (organizational culture, after all, is the trump card), they can be a rapid accelerator for organizations committed to becoming flatter and more agile. This raises levels of Information Chaos as older and more rigid information workflows are disrupted, without a clear picture of what will take their place.

February 05, 2014

The game has changed. Information is the world’s new currency. Read just about any businesspublication and you will quickly conclude that how an organization manages its information assets is now just as fundamental a source of competitive differentiation as how it manages its physical assets, its human assets, and its financial assets.

Everything and every process is being re-imagined. According to Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard: “Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Every business leader is becoming a digital leader. Every person is becoming a technology company. We are entering the era of the Digital Industrial Economy."

You probably were expecting a “but,” and, yes, there is a “but.”

Amidst all of this opportunity, organizations are drowning in a sea of content and information. File servers are overflowing and multiplying, making it difficult for anyone to find anything. Information is leaking out of the organization at every turn. If information silos in our existing solutions weren’t bad enough, we now have our content popping up in new silos in SaaS applications that are beyond the reach of our conventional information governance frameworks. Content and information is coming at us at breakneck speed in an ever changing array of formats and as they would say in the Wizard of Oz, on PCs and laptops and tablets and phones, oh my. Organizations are struggling with the cost of legacy Systems of Record and fearful of the loss of control that’s represented by new Systems of Engagement.

Information Chaos reigns supreme.

In the face of this massive change, CIOs are increasingly under siege. There clearly is no more vulnerable place to be than CIO at a major organization – one newly appointed CIO told me “CIO” ought to stand for “Career Is Over.” Per the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Corporate Executive Board, Intel, TNS Global, here are some perspectives of CEOs about their CIOs:

Almost half of CEOs feel IT should be a commodity service purchased as needed.

Only a quarter of executives feel their CIO is performing above his or her peers.

Almost half of CEOs rate their CIOs negatively in terms of understanding the business and understanding how to apply IT in new ways to the business.

57% of the executives expect their IT function to change significantly over the next three years, and 12% predict a complete overhaul of IT.

On the one hand, in the Digital Industrial Economy, Information is the world’s new currency. On the other, #InfoChaos reigns supreme.

January 31, 2014

As we start to think about #AIIM14, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions and put them on a bit of a hot seat with regards to how they see the future -- and let attendees start thinking about your own questions to ask them in Orlando. Here are the three questions I'll ask:

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers?

1) What exists, 2) where is it, and 3) what is its exposure and/or its value? Our customers face the challenge of having their information-both physical and electronic-in various repositories and physical locations. Access, visibility, and effectively applying policy are all hurdles faced by the majority of our clients.

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

Chaos is still caused by lack of structure and enforcement of rules. Tools that help structure organizations information and that support and help execute information policy are what are needed. Over the next 18-24 months we see a trend in more effectively applying policies across all information within the organization. This challenge has been brought to the forefront in recent years due to increased litigation. We have also started to see a trend towards a more unified approach to information management.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Our solution is relevant to the biggest problems organizations face today. We deliver a product that helps structure an organization's information, deploy policy and enforce compliance. Customers are telling us that we have addressed the need in the market for an enterprise system that can bring information policy and lifecycle management to an actionable enforceable event. We cover all bases in terms of ease of use, flexibility, and functionality and lower cost of deployment (ownership) with a focus on working with clients to make their policies actionable and increasing the value that their staff can provide to an organization.

January 30, 2014

When is automation going to deliver the promises we have been hearing for years? Automation is software that automatically classifies records, starts the review cycle automatically, notifies re... read more

I attended three ARMA meetings last week and guess what topic all of them focused on? You guessed it, Information Governance. It is the hottest topic in the records management space today. If yo... read more

In a very visible (and heavily Tweeted) survey last year conducted by Avanade, over 1,000 business and IT leaders and 4,000 end users were asked about the impacts of social technologies on enter... read more

AIIM’s most recent research report on SharePoint found that 60% of SharePoint projects are stalled, struggling or failing, we really need to take some time to reflect upon why companies are fail... read more

Do you need to manage records in SharePoint? Join Jesse Wilkins in an AIIM 2014 pre-conference session on March 31 and learn how to manage records, ensure compliance, and prepare for civil litig... read more

For many organizations, the link between social and a strong metadata and taxonomy strategy is unclear. Unfortunately, this lack of clarity is fairly widespread across most organizations using c... read more

If you work for or own a business you are creating content every day. You are also receiving content every day. Within the content there is metadata being generated both by people and by the ... read more

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Last day to register for #AIIM14 and be elgible for the Google Glass drawing...

How do you influence people's hearts, minds, and actions? Guy’s message focuses on the goal of bringing about voluntary, enduring, and delightful change within your organization. The power of "enchantment" enables you to maneuver through difficult decisions, break entrenched habits, and get colleagues to work for long-term, mutually beneficial goals.

Big Data has been turned into intelligence before. White Castle is using a repeatable approach that pulls together differing perspectives into an actionable understanding. The emerging leadership skill elicits a safe container for identifying the elephant in the middle of the room, just as in the old fable resulting in turning data into the stories for shared company understanding and improved results.

Electronic Discovery (“eDiscovery”) can be a time-consuming, burdensome, and costly undertaking for organizations. Studies indicate that most organizations feel that formal data retention policies are valuable, but relatively few actually have one in place. Despite the prominent headlines, case law, data privacy issues, and regulatory risks, the “disconnects” between in-house IT and legal departments are growing more pronounced every year. Join us to discuss the enabling technologies and leading practices available to address these issues.

Dion Hinchcliffe, Chief Strategy Officer, Dachis Group

Transform The Way Work Gets Done

What will organizations have to design for in the next 7 years as they update their structure and processes to deal with high-velocity technological change in a deeply digital, social, mobile, data-centric, cloud-based world.

Thornton May, Author of The New Know, Innovation Powered by Analytics

Don't Blow your (S.M.A.C.) Stack

As a futurist I am obligated to attempt to identify inflection points — things that fundamentally disrupt the status quo, change the competitive dynamic, call into question existing practices and require a general cognitive reboot. I predict that four disruptive technologies, mnemonically labeled the “S.M.A.C. Stack” [Social, Mobile, Analytics/Big Data, and the Cloud] will shape the next competitive cycle. These technologies need to be understood, mastered and deployed to maximum effect.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Research Director, 451 Research

The Fragmented Enterprise: ECM in the Era of Social Business

The traditional organizational structure of workers sat at desktops, connecting to a business application protected by a firewall is rapidly eroding. In a short period of time we have gone from a wired and bound world, to an unwired "internet in the pocket" world. Driven by the power of the cloud and the crowd, enterprise technology is experiencing innovation at an unparalleled pace with no sign of things slowing down. In this keynote session we will look at what this new digital infrastructure enables, both the positive opportunities for truly social business to emerge alongside the challenges and serious unresolved issues it also raises.

January 28, 2014

Today is Data Privacy Day. It is hard to say when tipping points occur, but the combination of the NSA revelations and the sophistication of the recent Target thefts have me thinking a lot more about this issue than I did as recently as 12 months ago.

Here's some useful information about Data Privacy passed along from Iron Mountain...

Data Privacy Day is an international holiday that occurs every January 28. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote data privacy education. It is currently celebrated in the U.S., Canada and 27 European countries. In Europe, the holiday is referred to as Data Protection Day. (source: Wikipedia)

According to the official press release from the National Cyber Security Alliance:

“Data Privacy Day strives to educate the world about data privacy protection through its universal theme: Respecting Privacy, Safeguarding Data and Enabling Trust. The global effort is made successful through a flood of activities from more than 140 supporting organizations and individuals across the globe. Plans to celebrate Data Privacy Day have been made in numerous countries including Australia, Japan, India, Belgium and Canada. While here in the U.S., many colleges and universities, businesses and community organizations will celebrate Data Privacy Day in their own unique ways.”

Top 10 Strategies for Protecting Data At Your Company

To celebrate Data Privacy Day, Jay Livens, director of product and solutions marketing at Iron Mountain has compiled a checklist of top 10 strategies for businesses who want to keep their information safe and from getting into the wrong hands. Take a look:

Encryption is key. Make sure all of your data is encrypted – whether it’s information you keep in digital storage, tape, or on your employees’ mobile devices. Wherever there is sensitive information, there should also be encryption.

Manage Mobile Devices. The ever-mobile employee of today can have a lot of sensitive information on their phones and tablets. Make sure you have a mobile device management solution or policy in place to protect those devices, whether corporate or employee-owned.

Out with the Old. Ensure that comprehensive corporate policy accounts for the secure destruction of old and sensitive company, employee and customer information.

Store Smart. You should always know how your information is secured – whether it’s in the cloud, in a data center or housed locally.

Plan Ahead. Make sure you have an end-of-life plan in place for assets you no longer need or that will be destroyed. People tend to hold on to information for longer than they need. Make sure you dispose of IT assets in a safe and consistent manner to protect from a potential data breach.

Password Protect. Use complex passwords, change them frequently and use two factor authentication whenever possible.

Virus Protection. It seems like a no-brainer, but keeping up-to-date with virus protection is a great way to keep data safe.

Don’t Forget Firewalls. Firewalls and intrusion detection are also a key piece of the data privacy puzzle.

Privacy is the Best Policy. Create an enterprise-wide policy to protect private information from unauthorized access or inadvertent disclosure.

Education Nation. Properly train your employees to treat information appropriately, and make sure everyone is up to speed on the latest policies and procedures.

Data from a recent Iron Mountain Survey

Recently, Iron Mountain conducted a survey of IT professionals on how organizations will protect data in 2014 and beyond. You can read the official release here, but here are the top-level highlights:

Data loss ranks as number one concern of IT leaders: With 68 percent probability, the report shows that data loss and privacy breaches are the most prevalent concern for IT leaders over the next 12-18 months.

Managing increased data volumes will continue to overwhelm organizations: There is a 77 percent likelihood that the rising tide of data will remain the greatest challenge facing IT organizations. Contributing to the issue is that many enterprises have data stored on various technologies, making access to this data a concern as these organizations work to meet growing archiving requirements.

Backup tape is still an attractive storage option: Respondents indicated with a 62 percent confidence level that IT organizations are grappling with limited funding for aligning data growth and data protection. At the same time, tape’s low total cost of ownership (TCO) makes it an attractive factor for its role in a hybrid backup strategy.

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This is clearly a major #InfoChaos issue, and one of the issues we'll be talking about at #AIIM14 on April 1-3 in Orlando. Early bird registration ends January 31.

If you are involved in a SharePoint implementation at your organization -- or if you are an SI in the SharePoint space -- you need this book.

The focus audience for the book is CIOs, marketing executives, project managers, and enterprise architects. The book focuses on how to:

Design a scalable, easy-to-use content management repository

Build an ECM team with specific project governance roles

Gain stakeholder support for project and change management

Foster user adoption by clarifying general IA concepts

Organize content using SharePoint records management tools

Configure content types, managed metadata, and site settings

Examine processes for managing paper-driven vs. digital content

Apply best practices for deploying SharePoint ECM features

Support risk management and compliance regulations

It's worth checking out.

[Note: For those of you who don't know them, Shad has managed over 300 large scale information technology deployments, as an engineer and later in executive positions. He has worked with many technologies, manufacturers, and customers from installing early versions of Novell Netware to developing business process management and document imaging solutions. Chris is a recognized industry expert in ECM, SharePoint, Big Data, and Cloud. He has 15 years of experience in the ECM arena. He holds the following certifications from AIIM, the enterprise content management (ECM) trade organization: “Enterprise Content Management Practitioner (ECMp),” “Information, Organization, and Access Practitioner (IOAp),” and “Capture." Chris is a sought after speaker and educator throughout the content gathering and delivery space.]

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You might also find this paper from AIIM, Control SharePoint: Rule Your Information Domain With Governance, of interest.

January 27, 2014

Can you share information without compromising security or control? All it takes is one rogue Twitter or Facebook post to deliver a significant blow to your brand image. While you can’t be cavalier about who says what in your organization’s name, neither can you lock down access to social media outlets. So what's the solution? Establish a social media policy to proactively guide your employees on leveraging social business while protecting your organization.

How well your employees adapt to and adopt a new technology initiative will determine how effect the plan contributes to boosting your company's productivity and bottom line. Learn how to accurately and effectively manage your organization’s content, and adapt to change with an enterprise content management strategy.

In order to improve governance and minimize risk to your organization, you must have 100% adoption of records management policies from top level management to line of business employees. Everyone must play a part! Learn how to avoid unfortunate and costly non-compliance issues with this NEW ERM best practices checklist.

A successful implementation of SharePoint for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) requires a strategy and structure for how to share and manage information. Governance, as it relates to information management, addresses how information is created and managed in the enterprise. Most organizations have some form of information governance in place, the question is how well can it be applied to your SharePoint environment.

To remove inefficiencies with your business information you need to first have a process for identifying and then a plan for eliminating those gaps. Read this new checklist and learn how to successfully develop taxonomies with your organizations content.

Organizations will succeed only when you encourage a collaborative environment in all aspects of information management. Learn ways to simplify business intelligence, content management, search and sharing in this FREE checklist.

Companies run on information. Your customers' information enters your company from paper documents, email, fax, mobile, Web, social, and MFPs. Capture is no longer a take paper, insert in scanner, create document image process. Capture tools can now ingest data from multiple streams and covert into meaningful insight that can improve your business.

If your organization is like most, you've got bottlenecks in how your organization captures, accesses, and manages core business information. Get this checklist and learn how to streamline and re-engineer your processes with some powerful research results.

Organizations need to take a holistic approach to managing their records and information. Policies and processes must address information across the whole enterprise. As email and instant messaging have come into extensive use, we have seen additional policies to support their usage. In the past few years, as social business has become very popular in organizations, we are seeing policies that cover social media that may very well address the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media applications.

Effective management of business processes requires periodic assessment to determine whether goals and objectives are being met, and to take corrective actions where they are not. At the same time, one of the challenges organizations face as they implement social business processes and technologies is determining where to start. In both instances it makes sense to conduct some sort of formal, rigorous assessment to understand where the organization is for particular processes and how to improve them.

Most business processes happen through serendipitous need. Action is needed, someone does something that works, and the organization accepts this as the way things should be done going forward. As such, many organizations do not fully understand how things happen nor have they considered alternative ways to improve their processes, especially in relation to their content and how it moves through the organization. In order to truly understand organizational processes and the impact they have with content or content with the process, you need to map the process and document the interaction with content.

From the beginning of time, there has been a need to capture information for various reasons. We use the captured information to communicate, and share ideas and history with others, evolving from hieroglyphics to modern day content in both paper and digitally-born form. To manage the capture of paper-based information, imaging is the tool used to scan and connect the paper world of the past with the present. All of this effort in capturing and managing information revolves around the desire to organize and find those bits of information deemed to have business value.

Back in the era of SharePoint 2007, few people thought we’d be discussing records management with SharePoint 2010, let alone automating records management with it. Yet here we are with this very real possibility and two ways that we can achieve it. In this paper, we start by answering the question that is begged of ERM automation in SharePoint that most start with, namely, “is that even possible?” The short answer is... Yes. The long answer is, it must be planned and isn’t easy to establish, you need a good amount of knowledge up front, but an organization that plans will be served very well.

Often, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects are mandated from above to address a business problem that has emerged or a perceived benefit that will be gained as a result of implementing ECM. At other times, ECM is a strategic directive focused on moving an organization in a new direction based on vision of what the organization could be like in the future. This is where we will often hear references to the use of ECM technologies in support of collaboration and social business initiatives. Organizations want to strengthen collaborative capabilities internally and expand interactions with clients through the use of social media tools. In either case, you will need to identify the organizational vision and goals, and current state problems in achieving those goals.

People have different styles of learning. The challenge of any new system, and SharePoint is no exception, is getting people comfortable enough that they will return, use it, teach themselves, and encourage others. By having a self-supported system, with access to online training materials for the basics, support/helpdesk calls are largely reduced. The other challenge is inspiring people to share what they learn with others and to document as they go. As with any acquired skill; we all forget very quickly how hard it was to begin, and how easy it became with time. Tools like wikis and FAQ forums all assist in capturing and sharing the knowledge from the whole team.